Thursday, 31 August 2017

I have to echo Rob Donoghue -- I'm looking forward to DUSK CITY OUTLAWS and SHADOW OF THE CENTURY a lot. I'm also looking forward to seeing what the revised edition of STARS WITHOUT NUMBER looks like.

But, to be honest, I'm also looking forward to catching up on a couple of 2017 games I haven't got my hot little hands on yet -- DRESDEN FILES ACCELERATED and BLADES IN THE DARK are definite must-gets for me, when I've got the cash. And I'm looking forward to getting some play time with a few games I've Kickstarted, especially THE WATCH. And if I'm very brave, maybe I'll get a chance to play BLUEBEARD'S BRIDE.

Wednesday, 30 August 2017

How about Jazz Age space opera? Spaceships and fedoras. Glamourous intergalactic speakeasys. Private eyes walking the mean streets of giant art deco space stations. Gangsters disposing of their inconveniences by tossing them into a black hole.

Or a steampunk game where it's steampunk + NOTHING. I really don't care for adding magic to my steampunk Victoriana, but it always seems to weasel its way in. How's that for an anti-mashup?

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

Hmm, this is a tough one, because I'm a relative newcomer to backing Kickstarters at all. Not for lack of wanting to, but because I mostly don't have the extra cash. I've only backed a handful of things, and most of them have delivered quite nicely. I've never backed anything that didn't produce a product at the end of it, luckily.

Monday, 28 August 2017

FATE provides an incredibly robust set of tools that can apply to practically any genre, and they're tools that the group can "tune" to their own tastes. FATE is such a staple of gaming to me, though, that I feel like it's almost cheating to use it as an answer.

So here are a couple of other games with great tools, just to keep it all above board.

Tuesday, 22 August 2017

I can dive into a FATE game with very little prep work, especially if I've got pre-gen characters for the players ready to go. This is something I used to do when I ran regularly at local cons -- set up pretty, accessible character sheets for running various things in Fate, so all I'd need to do was have a vague idea what the adventure was and I was ready to go. My pre-gens look like characters about 3/4 of the way done, and with a couple extra aspects/choices they're ready to play.

Thursday, 17 August 2017

I own an awful lot of games, and I have enjoyed them all (even if a number of them I've only read). I was happy to realize, after staring at my shelves for a while, that the vast majority of books I've got as a hard copy I've played at least once over the years. I had to compare copyright dates to see which of the contenders was published first.

Wednesday, 16 August 2017

Hmm. This is a harder question than which RPG I tinker with, which is a lot of them (in small ways). Again, it feels like cheating to say FATE, because that game is designed as a powerful and flexible toolkit that is intended to be adapted to whatever subject you're playing, and it includes explicit assistance to help you do it.

It also feels like cheating to answer using a vanilla ruleset like CALL OF CTHULHU uses, despite the fact I've been playing it (and by "it", I mean the 5th edition rules, from the early 90s) with virtually no changes for a long, long time.

Monday, 14 August 2017

In my experience, I've had much more productive play at my table by changing my focus to a short-game model, where every player at the table knows that they've only got (x) episodes to get their character issues on the table and they'd better play hard to make that happen. I know that in some quarters, this is seen as weird, but it's meant that in the last decade our games have been exponentially better. As an adult, I need my game time to be focused and for shit to get done.

Sunday, 13 August 2017

There are lots of excellent RPGs out there with top-notch production values. I've been reading Monte Cook's NUMENARA recently, and the art in that game is very high quality for a not-WotC-or-Paizo production. Especially when that game sets out to describe a science-fantasy world that's pretty different from your standard D&D-style world. The vistas are different, the characters are different, and the creatures... well, they're way different. ECLIPSE PHASE is another game that has out-of-this-world artwork and production values. I feel like that's almost expected for "bigger" games these days, even when they're not from a big publisher. Evil Hat has always set the bar very high for their books.

The game I want to give some love isn't one of the big ones, though there are a lot of worthy candidates. It's a smaller game (in terms of publisher size, not content -- this bad boy is almost 700 pages in the core book! staggering!) but the quality and consistency of the artwork is nothing short of inspiring. I'm talking about ZWEIHANDER - GRIM AND PERILOUS by Daniel Fox. This game was intended to be a retro-clone of early editions of WARHAMMER FANTASY ROLEPLAY, but it grew into something that is distinct despite its clear lineage. The artwork thus follows in that established tradition of artwork, detailing a dirty, Renaissance-era Europe full of scuzzy looking individuals and freaky looking mutants and demons and monsters, oh my.

Thursday, 10 August 2017

Somewhere around 10 sessions is the usual sweet spot for all of the games we play at our table, and we rarely go beyond that (except for games that have multiple "seasons").

I think the typical PbtA game tends to come to a boil by about session 8, though, so maybe play APOCALYPSE WORLD or one of its many children. Or you could play a game like PRIMETIME ADVENTURES with a pre-established number of sessions in the season "arc". (The longer series arc probably pushed us toward our current sweet spot of ten sessions, TBH.)

Thursday, 3 August 2017

Generally through social media. I follow a lot of game creators, and so I've often heard about something new they're working on (or something one of their friends is working on) long before it's actually available to purchase. Twitter and G+ are my platforms of choice, and to a lesser extent, Facebook. And, with Kickstarter casting such a big shadow over the industry, I often get to be among the first who play a new game, sometimes even before the books are completely done.

Tuesday, 1 August 2017

1. What published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?
I've got a long list of RPGs that I've purchased (and love) that I haven't yet been able to convince a group to play. That includes plenty of games that were a "hard no" for my players and a large assortment of games that we simply haven't made the time in our schedule yet.